In Afghanistan, Costs and Casualties Mount

Five Fort Bliss soldiers serving in Afghanistan were shot Tuesday by an Afghan wearing an Afghan Army uniform. One soldier, Pfc. Jeremy Young of Archdale, N.C., was shot 12 times before the attacker fled on foot and remained “at-large” as of Thursday.

The incident happened in the eastern province of Wardak, known for being a “Taliban hotbed.” (Yes, after nearly 12 years and a million soldiers and a dozen hearings in which generals tell us we’ve broken their momentum, there are still Taliban “hotbeds” in Afghanistan.) This, by the way, was the province where 38 people died when the Taliban shot down a Chinook helicopter carrying mostly U.S. military personnel, plus 8 Afghans, in August 2011.

It’s certainly not the first instance of “green-on-blue” attacks–Afghan “allies” engaging in surprise “fragging” of their international partners. On Monday, three British soldiers were killed in a similar fashion.

According to reports on Thursday, there have been a total of 19 such attacks involving 26 deaths, 13 of them American, as of early July. That nearly equals the number of attacks in all of 2011 — 21, with 35 deaths.

If you haven’t heard about any of this, don’t worry — the story barely registered a blip on the mainstream news radar. Years ago, a report that five soldiers were shot by a supposed Afghan ally would have raised a much bigger ruckus. As for fatalities, I bet you didn’t know we lost 165 servicemen in Afghanistan since the beginning of the year, 77 of them from improvised explosive devices (IED) planted by insurgents. We can only guess how many were injured by these IEDs but did not die because the Pentagon is not very generous with its non-fatal-injury statistics.

For example, according to icasualties.org, which is the best aggregator of such statistics around, there were only three Americans wounded in February, and that is the last month for which there is a record. Right. Seeing that in early March there were reports of soldiers banking their own sperm because the odds they would get their genitals blown off on the next tour of duty were nearly better than the reliability of Hamid Karzai wearing a Karakul hat at his next press conference, the numbers clearly reflect casualty stats the Pentagon wants to see, rather than what they really are.

But in a bubble-like corporate news environment, demand for vigorous reporting on the war now seems to be lacking. Switching on the telly Thursday, one would think the only burning question in America was whether Mitt Romney considers the penalty for not purchasing health insurance under the Affordable Healthcare Act a “tax” or “a penalty,” or as MSNBC’s Chuck Todd demanded with the smoothness of one whose tongue is swollen by bee stings: “so he believes that you should not call the man–the tax … penalty, a tax, you should call it a penalty or a fee or a fine?” He then asks Romney’s advisor to respond to a tweet by Rupert Murdoch calling for the prospective Republican nominee to “drop old friends” and hire a better team.

Stop the presses: Rupert Murdoch tweets? It would seem he has better things to do, considering his own “team” is slowly forming up a chain gang back in the UK. Never mind. It didn’t take long for Romney to change his tune, finally calling the penalty “a tax,” giving Todd and other intrepid political reporters gotcha goosebumps for the rest of the week.

Curiously, reporters never drill down like this on Romney’s foreign-policy views, so no one really knows what he plans to do about Afghanistan if he suddenly finds himself commander-in-chief next January. As someone who has toed the GOP line and criticized Obama’s “timeline” for withdrawing all combat troops by the end of 2013 (in fact he called the plan “naive”), will Romney defer to his generals and freeze the drawdown after his inauguration? If so, what does he plan to do with the 70,000 servicemen and women remaining in-country after that? (As of today there are about 88,000 U.S military still in Afghanistan. If you didn’t know that, again, blame the media.) What are his plans for working with Karzai? Negotiating with the Taliban? Pakistan?

Meanwhile, reports, if you can find them, are painting a grim picture for the future of Afghanistan. First, it seems we are bringing trainers home as fast as the troops, so the quality of the Afghan security forces is likely to be even worse than we expected. Poverty, displacement of civilians, human-rights violations, all are on the rise as we pull out, too.

Second, there are no American-led negotiations with the Taliban to ensure the best outcome, since it is obvious that the Taliban isn’t going anywhere, now or after we leave. There have been some baby steps in talks between Afghan government officials and Taliban, but no real progress can be made until the two major sides get together. No one has pressed Obama, or Romney, about this lately. Where is the diplomacy? It would seem nonexistant on this front–unless you consider Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent “apology” to the Pakistanis, “diplomatic progress.” All it did was re-open the less expensive border crossings for our supply trucks — in other words, back to the status quo.

Third, Karzai wants $4 billion a year in aid, $2 billion of that coming from the U.S. Seriously, do we have this kind of cash? We know our partners don’t.

Which brings us to the money. If ground zero of our national political debate is the ever-expanding federal pie, shouldn’t we pay just a little more attention to what we’re doling out in Afghanistan? The fiscal year 2013 defense budget calls for $88 billion more for the Afghanistan War. That’s less than previous years, but it’s still a lot. ($115.1 billion was approved in 2012, $158.8 billion spent in 2011, and $162.2 billion spent in 2010.) This, of course, does not account for the costs associated with “rebuilding” via USAID or the protracted costs of paying for veterans’ healthcare and disabilities over a lifetime.

Experts say that foreign-policy and national-security issues will continue to take a back seat in the presidential campaign, in part because the candidates’ views are so similar (lacking the tension needed for good copy) and Americans are “war weary” and more concerned with domestic bread-and-butter topics.

But war is a bread-and-butter issue. The military-industrial complex has generated a massive fiscal bubble, being both a jobs program and an economic engine that has become dysfunctional in its size and capacity for corruption and abuse, and unsustainable as we try to live with new budget constraints. We must talk about this because, even if indirectly, it will affect most of us right at the pocketbook and kitchen table.

Furthermore, the candidates’ views may be similar, but they are also largely undefined and will remain that way as long as no one in the media demands they make themselves clear. Instead news outlets have all convinced the rest of us that it’s not really that important. Personally, I see more lives and tax dollars at stake. I see Afghanistan on the precipice of being worse-off than when we got there, despite all the money spent and lives sacrificed.

That should be reason enough to care, at least more than about whether Romney calls a tax a penalty or a mandate a tax.

Kelly, can you do a story on Scott Horton and Antiwar Radio? I know you’ve been on his show several times show to discuss foreign policy issues, but with their money troubles, maybe some attention to their plight (and history) might help them out?

And if all this results in a serious breaking of the morale and professionalism of our guys on the ground (which I bet is at least dented already), then lots of the fault should also be put on the military itself. None of this—none—was unforseeable, and yet there the Joint Chiefs were, letting Petraeus and a few other career-climbers get their faces on the cover of Time and etc. with their “surge” ideas and etc.

Was there even *one* military voice demanding that supporters of the “stay and surge” brain-fart promise significant improvement in anything under ten years? Even *one*? Or otherwise try to pin to the wall *what* the timeline was?

Abolish the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I say. What good are they? Have they *ever* done what is, obviously, their *most* important job which is to tell politicians what is and what is not militarily feasible?

What’s the use of them, after all, if they are going to adopt the idea that their only role is to salute even if that saluting means the massacre of our troops?

And yet, in modern memory, can *anyone* remember when they stood up for even an instant to this or that politician’s idea, or this or that wanna-be rock-star general’s career-promoting political idea?

What’s their freaking use? Not to mention … being outsmarted by a bunch of guys sitting around in rags in caves wearing flip-flops?

You’re absolutely right Kelley, “war is a bread-and-butter issue.” But for 11 years now we have allowed the military to fleece the civilian sector of the wealth of this country, and I say that with over 30 years of military service so I know how wasteful and ignorant the military is when it comes to money, i.e., spend every penny before the end of the fiscal year and alsways demand more. Of course, they have done this with the full complicity of our civilian leaders, even being led by them in the case of the Bush adminstration. But we have got to get over our deference to the military and realize they’re not very smart when it comes to national strategy, nor, as they’re showing, military strategy, even when using the most expensive, destructive weapons ever in history against an enemy 10 generations behind us in technological development, who pose no threat to us except to fight back. A stupid military is a combat multiplier to those who wish to do us harm, after they have generated hate toward us which has never existed to this degree before. Great article in showing what is really happening. Without good reporters we would have fought the Vietnam War another 10 – 15 years with the Generals lying every step of the way on how there was light at the end of the tunnel, and then we would have gone belly up like the Soviet Union did. But the Generals like Westmoreland succeeded in silencing the media with their stab in the back accustions following the war.

good article, however, Icasualties is not a very good source to list as a reference. For instance, there were at least 5 US service personnel killed between the months of april and June that went unlisted from that site. those were just the ones I noticed. There are probably many more going back further. This can be corroborated by looking at the DoD casualty release statements that are made each week.

The guy that runs the site means well, but there’s apparently no way to contact him regarding these unlisted casualties.

“It would seem he has better things to do, considering his own “team” is slowly forming up a chain gang back in the UK.”

That’s a very funny line.

“(As of today there are about 88,000 U.S military still in Afghanistan. If you didn’t know that, again, blame the media.)”

But, but, that’s more troops than were there when Obama became President! I thought I heard Sarah Jessica Parker say that Obama has pulled all our troops out of Iraq (psst, Sarah, per George W’s timetable) and has begun pulling all our troops out of Afghanistan. Am I to believe you or Sarah Jessica Parker? I am astounded how the MSM gives Obama credit for winding down a war that he greatly expanded and extended until at least 2024.

Kelley, I love your articles, you are normally dead on (unlike some others), but please check your spending figures. I think in previous years you’re confusing Afghanistan spending with total spending.http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf

The US aims to replace MAD with Disarming First-Strike Capability according to missile engineer Bob Aldridge-www.plrc.org. The US Navy can track and destroy all enemy submarines simultaneously according to Bob Aldridge. Professor J:Edward Anderson, “Deployment of anti-missile missiles in Eastern Europe is part of a first-strike strategy.” The warheads on Minuteman-3 and Trident-2 are designed to minimize nuclear winter effects if used against missile silos according to Professor Paul Rogers. GPS (Navstar) was made to hit missile silos accurately. Bob Aldridge on the missiles in Eastern Europe, “Whether they are on ships or land, they are still a necessary component for an unanswerable first strike.” The missiles will be operational by 2018. This leads to Launch On Warning by 2017 and increased risk of Accidental Nuclear War.

Hi Don! Thanks for reading. I checked your FASreport and OMB’s numbers and find that mine were not entirely off for Afghanistan 2010-2012. I think there might have been some supplemental funding added in to FY2010’s allocation, and that would account for the higher number on my part, but other than that they seem to jibe. Let me know what I am missing.